This Fall we tried something new for our Parent Teacher conferences at North Canton Middle School. We used Google Calendar Appointment Slots to do all the scheduling... and it actually went quite well! Below I will explain the basics of what we did, what went well, what the challenges were, and provide links to both our staff directions and parent directions.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

We started with a vision for a better textbook: one that was interactive and engaging, one that took advantage of the opportunities afforded by new media like iPad. But we aren’t just reinventing publishing, or reinventing the book. We’re reinventing the way people learn.

From miura MyThreeWords.com is a sentence sharing game. Three words start a sentence off. Players are then able to enter three words at a time to continue the story. Any number of people can play at once. A fullstop, question mark or exclamation mark will end the story.All you need is a quick wit, fast fingers and some lightning fast connection! Are you any good? MyThreeWords - post by jane words

BigMarker is a free web conferencing community. Through our platform, you can reconnect with your family in Rio; manage your employees in Madagascar; organize your non-profit's resources to Ottawa; teach a virtual class from Tulsa to students all over Thailand; foster a support group for cancer survivors from France to the Falkland Islands. With unlimited access to live events, there are endless opportunities for you, your community, organization, business, classroom, and social network to grow.

This year within Parkland School Division, we are starting a “Learning Leader Project”, that will hopefully build capacity within the school division to take advantage of networked learning. We believe as a school division that we need to role model for our students explicit learning practice, and this is one of the ways that we will embark on this journey. Please feel free to use anything below and modify it for your own use.

Just because you’re online doesn’t mean that you can’t experience the world first-hand — or as close to first-hand as possible. Here are websites that feature virtual learning experiences, exposing online visitors to everything from history to geography, astronomy to anatomy, literature to government.

ShoutKey is the temporary url shortener that gives you a randomly chosen English word as the key for your URL. This makes it easy to share a URL in a non-electronic way, like telling your friend across the room or writing it on a whiteboard.

calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:Library ManagementE-book conversionSyncing to e-book reader devicesDownloading news from the web and converting it into e-book formComprehensive e-book viewerContent server for online access to your book collection

SonicPics is a very easy to use tool for turning your images into custom slideshow movies that you can share with your friends online! SonicPics lets you add images from your iPhone's photo library or camera, arrange your photos, and then narrate the project to create an enhanced m4v video (complete with chapters).

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Design activities for your English and Social classroom that promote the collaborative process through the use of Google tools. Current classroom models will be provided. Time will be given to create your own classroom activity.

Google forms are fabulous for gathering information, but sometimes, the data in the spreadsheet can be difficult to view. In this post, I’ll share a simple-to-implement formula and a bonus tip that will make it much easier to deal with (and even print) form-fed data!

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

The EDKB Wiki is a database that makes available the various interests, talents, and resources of the English Department community. See the Main Page to learn more about the EDKB. The wiki does not offer information on current course offerings, nor is it a comprehensive archive of materials related to all past courses. Visit the English Department home page for this type of information.

"Toy Chest" collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used on a free trial basis). Also on this page are "paradigms"--books, essays, digital projects, etc.--that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create.

Leading up to the annual conference of INOTE, the Irish National Organisation for Teachers of English, at the end of next week, here is a start on a list of useful websites for English teachers (not as a foreign or second language, but as a 'humanities' subject). 'Useful' actually means recommended - this is a 'curated' list, and very much evolving.

The list will be updated almost every day, so feel free to suggest more sites, with a brief comment, by the comments section underneath the post, or by Twitter via @sccenglish. Starting with Shakespeare, and continuing with General Poetry and English Teaching.

Welcome to CriticalPast.View more than 57,000 historic videos and 7 million photos for FREE in one of the world's largest collections of royalty-free archival stock footage. Offering immediate downloads in more than 10 SD and HD formats, including screeners in all formats.

On September 26th and 27th, I attended the Google Geo Institute at The University of Southern Maine in Lewiston/Auburn. The two mornings sessions were presentations and the afternoons were split between learning Google Earth and Google SketchUp. I enjoyed Toby Lester's speech about the Fourth Part of the World (his website is fantastic) and the Giant map of North America.